Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is stupid. It has a terrible story, one-dimensional characters, and there’s no emotional value in playing it whatsoever. I can’t even criticise it for all those things, because that’s everything Ubisoft wants the game to be. They think they’ve found a loophole in any criticism by deliberately aiming low. Hah! The joke’s on them! Blood Dragon is pretty good.

It’s everything fun about the ’80s. It is desert chrome and crappy cut-scenes, RoboCop’s sequels and Terminator’s music, silly names and apocalypses happening to apocalypses. And for some bizarre reason, they’ve made it into a Far Cry 3 game that has nothing to do with any of the previous Far Crys.

It is the future, the year 2007. After Vietnam II and multiple apocalypses, the world is all purple and glowy, like a corrupted VHS tape. You are Sergeant Rex Power Colt, a Mark IV Cyber Commando sent to a distant island to solve world peace by killing cyborgs. At this point you should know that at no point in its development was this ever a normal Far Cry 3 game. It always existed as a love letter to the ’80s.

Like the good bit of Predator, it begins in a helicopter with Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” blaring. We land, via a crash. Following a tutorial where the game freezes me in position and the character rails that he just wants to kill things (voiced with all the world weariness that Michael Biehn can muster), I am let loose on this retro futuristic world that’s decades away from Far Cry 3. The mercs are now electro-voiced robots. I giggled when I heard one shout “holy crap” through a grime of electronic distortion as my ninja star spiked him. I expected a more robotic expression. Who programmed a robot to do that? Probably the same person that programmed my robo-hand to toss up a metallic single digit whenever I mashed the stab button.

It’s incredibly stylised. The robots blast back with neon bullets, heads pop and glowing goo leaks out, the soundtrack is a thumping synth dirge that fits *perfectly*. Take too much damage and the screen will warp like a paused VHS. Cut-scenes play like they’re on an 8-bit console. The only bum note is the swearing in the animated sections. My inner child doesn’t remember any game with such rude language.

I meet up with another Mark IV and we head down to missile silo to disarm a nuke. It is sadly an escort mission through a heavily-armed area. It’s the opening mission, so it has the benefit of the doubt, but like all escort missions it comes with a sense of futility. I play Far Cry 3 to be free, and this is not that much fun. Not even when my partner died and I was forced to stop the nuke from exploding by punching it. That was cool, but it was also a cut-scene.

But it got better. After the nuke punching, I was captured and deposited into a plot of land filled with the game’s titular Blood Dragons. They’re real, and their vision is so poor it’s possible to sneak by them by crouch-walking. They also fire lasers from their eyes, because being a dragon isn’t enough. Handily, they’ll also attack anything covered in blood, so it’s possible to aggro them over to your cause by ripping the heart from the robo-mercs and tossing it like a grenade. This helps in the next section, an assault on an overground base that has giant shield protecting it. The first section is easy enough: I toss the robo-hearts through a megashield and the Blood Dragons start burning everything with their laser eyes. As you do.

The second section feels a little more Far Cryish: I finally have a bow, and can shoot down into the main area of the base below. The game’s HUD starts going over all the possibilities available to me, mockingly telling me of the stealth route, the assault route, how to cut the alarms, pissing off the one-note action hero I’m inhabiting. It’s fun when a game can make fun of its own conventions. I cracked up when I’d taken too much damage and instigated one of Far Cry’s grim ‘self-surgery’ animations: Rex brought out a welder and fired it over his damaged robo-hand.

This area feels like a bigger base than I’m used to from FC3, but it’s really just taller than the previous game’s spaces. I zipline down into the area and take cover, using the leftover hearts to draw the dragons in, and the bow and arrow to take the robots out. It’s wide, and I have plenty of room to move. I try and direct the laser beams to the majority of people I’m fighting, and only need to pick off a few stragglers with the bow. But just as I was getting exciting and interesting, the demo ends. I’m not allowed to venture out beyond this base.

This is not just a reskin of Far Cry 3, but it’s definitely cut from the same cloth. I wasn’t allowed to wander, but I’m told the world shares the same systems of the previous game. There’s an ecosystem of animals still out there, though they are roboticised variants of the beasts we once knew. There’s no need for crafting, but there’s a simplified character tree and you can upgrade weapons. The wingsuit is gone, but the hang-gliders remain and Rex doesn’t take fall damage. The mission structure remains in place as well: the central story will drag you across the island, but there are bases to liberate, marked on the game screen by laser-beacons firing into the purple sky, and missions pop up at each when you take them over.

I was a little bit miffed and surprised that I wasn’t allowed to adventure out from the first two missions. I don’t know anyone who sits down to tell you all about their adventures in Far Cry 3 and actually talks about the story missions, but that’s all that Ubisoft allowed me to play. I do trust them, though: it’s the same team working on this, and they’ve put a whole lot of love into it. I just can’t say for sure that the open-world is as exciting and as varied as the main game. I hope so, and think the left-of-field aesthetic has magicked up something so unexpectedly delightful that it might even make the original game seem a little bit flat.

All-in, they expect you to be fighting for about eight hours. It’s out May 1st.

Well crap. Still, it wasn’t too bad when I played Far Cry 3. I’m wary of Blood Dragon being pretty similar to that (tedious), but neon, chrome and lasers makes for a far more appealing world than whatever it was FC3 was trying to do.

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Of course, in the Beforetimes of the Forgotten Age there were only sequels.

No one knows the time when some sequels became standalone expansions, nor the reason why. Only that it was the Marketers of Legend that did move their hand and provide us modern mortals with such a bounty of neologism.

That’s kind of the sense it has in my mind too, but it quickly gets a bit fuzzy as you say. I’m thinking of the Dawn of War expandalone’s vs Assassin’s Creed 2 / Brotherhood / Revelations – they both used the same engine but had new assets and some new mechanics and a new story.

I guess they were charging less for the ‘expandalones’ than for the ‘sequels’.

As for ‘standalone DLC’ that has no story connection to the original and doesn’t require it to play…heaven knows. It’s just a cheap downloadable game (for which I am excited!)…

The first one I remember was Alien Breed Special Edition ’92, although that didn’t go to such random lengths as this, it did have a video of SuperFrog on the disk, which was pretty amazing at the time.

My guess would be that they started making this as a pass-time activity, as a joke, but then it turned out to be a funny enough an idea that they pitched it to Ubisoft. Doubt Ubisoft would come up with greatness such as this on their own.

I don’t really like the tongue iin cheek satire of Far cry 3, because It felt liek they missed their point
Probably because they wanted to make their game less of the brainless shooter it was but still hadn’t the balls to make a proper satire…

Right. This is what a good parody looks like. In its philosophy it captures and makes fun of everything that is dumb about dumb vidyagames but without being snide. In its gameplay it captures what is fun about vidyagames. BAM DONE. Turns out irony isn’t dead.

I’d say a ‘brainless shooter’ is something where enemies just pop out in front of you and there’s no thought required in popping them back down. At its best, during the base captures, Far Cry 3 is not a brainless shooter. Its story missions were mostly terrible, but there’s a good quality shooter in there somewhere.

Hmm I wonder why no one is writing their thoughts about “demo” that is already available on not very official sources?…

I did try it and thought it to be much less amusing. Too much neon, it’s always dark, gameplay is pretty much exactly the same as farcry 3, overall setting tries to much to be like early 90s, but in the end is kinda nothing like it and constant over the top jokes/irony/hyperbole/screaming got me tired pretty quickly.

That was my impression from first couple of hours (any longer would be pushing my conscience about it being a “demo”), maybe it becomes better, but it surely ain’t nothing like NOLF.

ps. Actually, now that I think about it, what bothered me most is that it tries to be old-school on the outside, but gameplay-wise is still a modern clunky FPS. I guess I would’ve loved it if it handled with a buttery smooth feeling like quake 1-3, without stupid bobbing and slow reloading, with pixel-perfect aiming, always-run without inertia, etc

If it requires Uplay then forget it. They lied about backpedaling on their DRM when they were hyping up FC3. When the servers when down briefly people weren’t able to play FC3 or they had very odd glitches

I had the same experience as Craig – set Uplay to offline, and played the game. True, the short pause every time I went into the menu where it tried to phone home was annoying, but at least I could play the game. In contrast, Steam’s offline mode has never worked for me so far, so some kudos for Ubisoft for getting this right. Let’s hope it lasts …

Far Cry® 3: Blood Dragon is THE Kick-Ass Cyber Shooter. Welcome to an 80’s vision of the future. The year is 2007 and you are Sargent Rex Colt, a Mark IV Cyber Commando. ,Your mission: get the girl, kill the baddies, and save the world.